Amazon CEO Says Fire Phone Was a ‘Bold Bet’

Jeff Bezos doesn’t regret the Amazon Fire Phone, the company’s CEO said Tuesday, despite mixed reviews and weak sales that forced his company to take a multimillion dollar write-down on unsold inventory.

“People love to focus on things that aren’t working,” Bezos said at Business Insider‘s annual Ignition conference in New York. “That’s fine, but it’s incredibly hard to get people to take bold bets. And if you push people to take bold bets, there will be experiments… that don’t work,”

Bezos appeared to put the Fire Phone in a category of what he called “smart failures,” NBC reports, saying that “companies that don’t continue to experiment, that don’t embrace failure” end up in trouble later.

Asked when customers can expect another Amazon phone, Bezos said “It’s going to take many iterations. I don’t know. Ask me in some number of years.”